Healing Begins Where Thinking Ends

How I spent my life avoiding feeling and the moment I finally said yes to pain.

Feeling my feelings is difficult!

I’ve spent most of my life in a never-ending race, convinced that somehow I could outrun the need to actually sit with my own difficult emotions.

Better yet, I convinced myself I could absolutely resolve all of them before they ever caught up to me.

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The Escape Plan

I attempted to heal without feeling in a multitude of ways.

As a teenager I ran into relationships, sex, drugs, music, and fighting the world as the only rebel smart enough to get it done!

After discovering relationships were not the answer, I kept the sex and drugs, and added travel. Because obviously no one got me at home and I just needed to find the right people who truly understood.

Eventually, travel became too expensive, and I realised I needed to do something with my life.

I turned to psychology as the only thing that remotely interested me and I had a hope that it could provide some clarity as to why people are the way they are. What I didn’t realise at the time, was that I wasn’t trying to understand people, I was trying to make sense of my pain.

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The Intellectual Defence

Studying the psyche was a particularly genius move. It allowed me to rationalise and categorise my experiences and behaviour; turning the chaos of my inner world into something I could label.

In doing so, I bought myself distance.

I made understanding my defence — neatly avoiding the very thing I was supposedly investigating.

Slowly, my pain began to make sense.

There were all sorts of reasons why I struggled:

I couldn’t go outside without blasting high-volume headphones — because being moved around constantly as a child made crowds feel overwhelming.

I felt completely empty between activities — because my neurochemistry was out of whack.

I starved and binged — because society imposes impossible beauty standards I tried (and failed) to live up to.

I froze at the first sign of overwhelm — because I’m someone who struggles to multitask under pressure.

I obsessed in front of the mirror — oh right, that beauty standards thing again.

The map was pretty clear, or so I thought. Whatever remained murky was conveniently filed under — “people and society just suck.”

After my degree I became increasingly isolated and retreated into the fantasy world of cinema and narrative media when not working.

Eventually, I withdrew from society altogether. No parties, dinners, or social events. I buried myself in work and immersed in metaphysical teachings, trauma healing, spirituality, and shadow work.

I gained a macro metaphysical perspective on the human condition but that, too, became another hiding place.

A spiritual bypass disguised as enlightenment.

I had built an impressive palace of insight — but no one lived there. I could name the pain, trace the pattern, even map the trauma timeline, but I still couldn’t feel any of it.

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When Love Demands More

Time passed — lifetimes, really.
I left and rebuilt myself from Ireland to Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Bali, and finally Germany. I searched for meaning, and I found a lot of it. But something was missing.

I wasn’t at peace — and there was no practical reason why that should be.

It wasn’t until everything fell apart — completely — that I finally considered the possibility:

Maybe I hadn’t gotten my shit together after all.

Totally unexpectedly of course, I found myself standing before the person I love most in this wold, sobbing, while he screamed at me in desperation — begging me to feel.

My running was hurting him — deeply. And in that moment, I realised something devastating:

I had never actually felt a single ounce of my accumulated pain.

I’d never stopped nor processed the trauma. I’d been sprinting from feeling my whole life, and he had been carrying the weight of that for far too long.

I had endless reasons why not:

Worries that needed to be worried.

Crises to manage.

Work to be done.

Besides, I was fine and getting along okay.

And I’m sure every time I smoked a joint there were some medicinal psychotherapeutic and spiritual benefits, right?... Right!?

The truth is, nothing in my life had been made unattainable by avoiding my feelings. So there was no urgency to face them. That changed when I fell in love.

Suddenly, my heart, soul, and body all longed to bond with another actual human. We both wanted to merge, to be seen, to surrender.

Our whole beings rushed toward each other with a velocity I could barely comprehend. It was beautiful — but as fast as we were moving we slammed into the walls of our unprocessed trauma.

Despite what I thought I had worked through, my heart was still absolutely raw and as I quickly discovered, love doesn’t bypass what hasn’t been healed.

When there’s a reservoir of unprocessed trauma that rivals the Hoover Dam, bonding doesn’t just feel tender — it also feels dangerous. Intimacy becomes a test of faith, an excruciating exercise in trust. What I wanted most became the very thing I feared.

“But…but…but…” was the looping mantra that haunted our connection. Fear upon fear, stacked like bricks in a wall designed to keep me safe. But that wall stood between me and the man I loved. So… it had to go.

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The Flood

For over a year, my partner fought to reach me — pouring himself into our love with relentless devotion. He tried everything. And slowly, it broke him.

His strength began to wither under the weight of my resistance. I watched him grow exhausted, heartbroken, and forced to witness his love being swallowed by fear.

And then I was given a choice: join the fight, or lose everything.

He had fought valiantly. But in the end, I had to rise, with him. I had to take up my own sword and help slay the dragon that kept me locked in a frozen tower of solitude.

My bravery, however, didn’t look like battle cries or grand gestures. It looked like surrender. Like sitting still in the fire and letting it burn through me.

In the moment, it felt like saying yes to the horror because when the dam finally broke, it wasn’t beautiful — it was terrifying.

My system flooded with grief, rage, and a desolate certainty that I would never feel joy again.

I cried until my body convulsed. I shook, I screamed, I curled up into corners, overwhelmed by emotions that had been waiting decades to be felt.

This was not the catharsis I imagined. There was no clarity, no peace — just pain. But for the first time in my life, it was my pain and I was there to feel it.

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The Real Work Begins

This is where things got harder, not easier.

See, trauma fragments the self. The nervous system stores pain in the body, long after the mind has forgotten. So now, even when emotions surface, I struggle to name them.

My brain wants to jump in — dissect, understand, solve. But healing doesn’t live in the mind. It lives in the body.

The irony is, my well-trained mind — once my greatest asset — has now become a liability.

It gets in the way and tries to narrate what I need to feel. It interrupts my surrender and tortures those around me by intellectualising what was meant to be metabolised somatically.

I want to feel — I just don’t know how. Not yet.

To be who I truly am is the answer. But I’ve spent a lifetime avoiding that very thing. I am loved for who I am, but my system doesn’t trust it.

My trauma says: you must hide and become someone else to be safe. And that lie has been rehearsed so many times, it feels like truth.

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The Leap

But the only truth that matters now is this:

These things have to be felt. Regardless of what my mind thinks. Regardless of how well I can explain it. Regardless of how afraid I am.

So truly there is only one thing left to do.

Take. That. Leap. Of. Faith.

Jump without needing proof you’ll be caught.
Trust the ones who love you.
Trust the process.
Trust your own capacity to survive the fall.

You can’t see the bottom.
There is no light illuminating the abyss.

But still — you jump.

Because you are enough to be caught.

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Elsewhere in The Province of the Mind:

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